SCOTLAND'S top police officer has warned the monsters behind the hidden horror of domestic abuse: “We will hunt you down.”

Police Scotland Chief Constable Sir Stephen House pledged to be relentless in his pursuit of offenders and has made tackling the scourge one of the force’stop priorities.

Domestic abuse incidents are often discussed at House’s thrice weekly meetings with his senior command team in Stirling and are subjected to a high level of scrutiny.

He revealed: “If there has been a report of 15 domestic abuse crimes the question I would expect the Divisional Commander to ask – because it’s what I ask – is how many prisoners do we have?

“If the answer isn’t 15, we will want to know why.

“It could be only 13 because one has run away and one is still being processed for example. But we expect that level of detail.”

When he joined the then Strathclyde force as chief constable seven years ago, House was responsible for seismic changes in the way this type of crime was handled.

He created a new Domestic Abuse Task Force to target high-profile repeat offenders as well as piloting a specialist domestic abuse court in Glasgow.

It’s a war he is clearly determined to win.

He said: “I do feel very passionately about it but I feel very passionately about our job, which is keeping people safe.

“My view is that people in abusive domestic relationships are in incredibly vulnerable positions – perhaps the most vulnerable.

“It’s very rare that in Scotland the public won’t step in and stop a crime happening in public if they see it.

“But if it happens behind closed doors by somebody you’re allegedly in a loving relationship with, then that’s like a prison sentence except nobody knows about it.

“If Police Scotland can’t offer protection to people in that circumstance then we’re not doing our job.”

House says that attitudes in society – and within his own force – have changed dramatically in the last few years.

He added: “Officers’ attitudes have certainly changed.

“It’s not that they would ignore it before but now they’re far more confident of what we expect them to do.

“They know that we review the cases and we expect a result.”

Now, if officers find evidence of a crime they will often make a decision to take someone into custody – even if that is against the will of the victim.

House added: “What I say to cops when I speak to them about this is you go through a door at three in the morning and there’s a woman there who’s got a bloody nose, she’s not going to stand there and say this man has been raping me consistently for the past 10 years.

“She’s going to say he’s hit me in the face or he hasn’t done anything, I fell over.

“We’re not marriage guidance, we’re not there to offer support on relationships. We are there to keep people safe and that’s what we’ll do.

“If that means taking somebody into custody to work out what’s going on, that’s what we’ll do.

“Very often what happens is if you take a man into custody, all of a sudden the victim will say, ‘I’ll make a statement now’ because you’ve done something, you’ve taken him away.’

“The cops will act and they will then give the victim thinking time to say, ‘This is my opportunity to get out of this.’

“She will then give a statement to our specialist officers saying, ‘Actually I’ve been subjected to a campaign of assault and rape and physical and mental intimidation or financial and emotional coercion for years and I want to do something about it.’”

House – who admits “you wouldn’t get a fag paper between Police Scotland and the Crown in terms of their view on domestic abuse” – says he supports new legislation, called for by Solicitor General Lesley Thomson, to make domestic abuse a specific offence which could take non-violent incidents into account.

He contends that one of the current difficulties can be to show the extent of abuse outwith physical violence and added:

“It’s not just that a man hits his partner, but he might not allow her any money, or he takes her pay packet. She may not be allowed access to her mum or her mobile phone or he might check her mobile every night to make sure she’s not been phoning anyone he doesn’t want her to speak to.

“He could follow her, or bombard her with texts every day.

“Some of that falls into harassment which of course is a crime in itself.

“But the general state of the relationship where it deteriorates from a bad relationship where they’re not getting on into feelings of fear and intimidation is much more difficult for us to factualise – we can’t turn that into fact.

“If the legislation is written in such a way that that whole course of conduct can lead up to and contribute to an offence of domestic abuse, we would support that.”

Police Scotland spend a quarter of their time investigating domestic abuse allegations, but House insists that if those are the resources needed to tackle the crime, so be it.

He said: “My answer is so what? That’s their job, if that’s what they should be spending time on, then that’s what they will be doing.

“Cops say it’s 25 per cent of our time – but they don’t say it negatively.

“They are themselves husbands, wives, brothers and sisters and they don’t want to tolerate it either.

“We won’t walk past anything like this. We will hunt down offenders and we will protect victims.”

House says that after an offender is caught the force will ensure that they stick to their bail conditions.

He added: “That’s one of the things that we measure relentlessly on a daily basis.

“Are we checking on their bail conditions and are we knocking on their door? Are they at home when they should be?

“These are the things that we do. We crack down on the offenders, that’s our part of the bargain. By doing that we do one very important thing, we tell the people who do this that it’s unacceptable.

“You’re breaking the law. You’re not allowed to hit people or push them around, it’s against the law and people need to be confronted with that.

“That is often the start of them thinking this is unacceptable behaviour and sometimes they stop.”

He says there is also a need to focus more on the perpetrators and not the victims.

He added: “It’s important victims know what the police are doing but the people we should be speaking to are the men.

“In the main it’s men who cause domestic abuse.”

The Chief Constable has also backed a scheme giving Scots the right to discover if their partner had a history of offending.

He says he would like to see a pilot scheme of the so-called Clare’s Law – named after Clare Wood who was murdered by her ex- boyfriend in 2009 – north of the border.

House said: “There are sensitivities around it, in terms of what we know and we have to make sure what we are saying is accurate.

“Also, how far back do you go? If somebody was convicted of domestic abuse 25 years ago, do we tell their new partner or do we say, ‘Well we’ve looked and we can’t find any record in the last 25 years?

“These are all things which need to be tested out in the pilot.” He says the new single force in Scotland means it is now easier to keep tabs on serial offenders who move around the country.

He added: “With eight forces, if an offender moved from one force area to another they were, to a certain extent, invisible.

“They’re not invisible to us. We can track people moving from one part of the country to another.

“Sometimes they’ll move around with the same partner, but sometimes they’ll move from one partner to another and it’s interesting how similar the abusive relationship is.

“In the first year of Police Scotland, the three task forces targeted just under 230 what we call high risk domestic abuse offenders and many of them were serial perpetrators.”

Hero soldier beat me to a pulp, says domestic abuse victim Caroline

Caroline's injuries after final attack.

It’s hard to look at the police photographs of Caroline McGhee’s injuries following the brutal assault perpetrated by her husband.

Her body was battered and bruised and burst blood vessels stained the whites of her eyes after squaddie Cameron Hayhurst throttled her till she played dead.

What is not visible is the terror that gripped her heart as she thought of their one-year-old child crying in a bedroom upstairs.

She said: “I knew I wasn’t getting out of that house alive. There was no doubt about it. He wanted to kill me.

“He realised I was just pretending to be unconscious and he attacked me again, kicking into my sides.

“I was trying to think what a dying girl’s last request should be so I could ask for something that would make him stop.

“Telling him I loved him wasn’t working, telling him to think about our child wasn’t working.

“I asked for a cigarette at one point and he let me go for a light. I ran to the door but he caught me at the porch, hands round my throat again.

“All the time he was laughing at me, saying how pathetic I was. That’s the bit that still haunts me when I go to bed at night.”

The attack happened in 2012 at the Army marital quarters they shared in Inverness.

They had been together for six years and married for two.

Caroline McGhee with Hayhurst on their wedding day.

Caroline says she lived in fear throughout their relationship. She is speaking out in support of proposed new laws that would allow prosecutors to take on cases involving years of abuse, not just one-off incidents.

In March, Caroline, 28, stood bravely in the High Court in Glasgow to see her ex plead guilty to assaulting her to the danger of her life.

But she insists she did not see justice that day as a plea bargain saw the Crown accept Hayhurst’s not guilty pleas to five other assault claims.

Hayhurst, 25, a private in the Royal Regiment of Scotland, walked free with sentence deferred for a year while he receives intensive treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Caroline was left with the words of the judge, Lord Turnbull, ringing in her ears. He told the court Hayhurst was a “brave soldier” who had “served his country well”.

Caroline said: “He said that he had suffered enough because he had been on remand for about six months.

“I couldn’t believe it. They basically dismissed everything that had happened to me and praised him for being a soldier.

“The police did an amazing job. They tracked down my old roommates from my college days in 2006.

“They went to the dental hospital and found records of when I was treated there. But none of it was heard in court.”

Caroline has also launched a Facebook campaign – Scottish Unjust System – to collate the experiences of others.

She said: “The truth actually does set you free.

“That’s an important message I want to get across to victims of domestic violence.”